Author: Sharmadip Basu

Sharmadip Basu is a generalist who currently fashions himself as a historian of modern South Asia. While a keen observer of politics, his scholarly interest lies in studying the entanglements of music and modernity in the colonial context. He is an ex-Organizing Committee member of the New York-based South Asia Solidarity Initiative. Having previously taught at Syracuse University and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he is at present Assistant Professor in the School of Liberal Studies at Azim Premji University, Bangalore.

As the philosopher Walter Benjamin noted, in a context not entirely dissimilar to one we are living through, “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” Rest assured, the casteist Hindu Right and the merit-wielding technocrats will not care whether the dead came draped in red or blue.